Posted
by
BeauHDon Thursday February 16, 2017 @10:30PM
from the vegan-friendly dept.

A new study published in the journal Scientific Reports describes research "designed to generate muscle from a newly established pig stem-cell line, rather than from primary cells taken directly from a pig," says co-author Dr. Nicholas Genovese, a stem-cell biologist. "This entailed understanding the biology of relatively uncharacterized and recently-derived porcine induced pluripotent stem cell lines. What conditions support cell growth, survival and differentiation? These are all questions I had to figure out in the lab before the cells could be turned into muscle." Digital Trends reports: It may not sound like the most appetizing of foodstuffs, but pig skeletal muscle is in fact the main component of pork. The fact that it could be grown from a stem-cell line, rather than from a whole pig, is a major advance. This is also true of the paper's second big development: the fact that this cultivation of pig skeletal muscle didn't use animal serum, a component which has been used in other livestock muscle cultivation processes. [Genovese] acknowledges that there are other non-food-related possibilities the work hints at. "There is a contingent interest in using the pig as a model to study disease and test regenerative therapies for human conditions," he said.

I guess that means you didn't like "God Emperor" much. It was ok by me, and I liked where Herbert was going in the new series with "Heretics" and "Chapterhouse" (different, but it grew on me), but then death [deviantart.com] interfered, and now we must rely on Herbert's son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson to imagine what would have happened next. I haven't read any of those, but it seems reviews are decidedly mixed.

Actually, just call it "blood pudding", serve it with baked beans and tea, and you have a "full English breakfast".

On a side note, this was the real reason behind the "Brexit". Eurocrats in Brussels wanted to mandate the EU breakfast as a stale plastic croissant and a thimble of muddy coffee, which left the UK with no other choice than to leave the EU.

Take a look at what happens with a child's personality/intelligence if you let it grow up in a closed, single room, with very few mental stimuli, rigorous routine and only the bare minimum to stay alive.

Then your daughter needs to work out why she is a Vegan.It obviously has nothing to do with animal cruelty or even animal death.She is making it into another pointless religion and not a serious reason for sensible people to do good.

If the aim of veganism is to protect the welfare of animals, and you can clone a cell line from an animal (possibly without even hurting it) then I don't see how this wouldn't ultimately benefit animal welfare.

A cell is a cell. Even the plant cells she's eating originated from a common ancestor with animals (plants and animals are all eukaryotes). So unless she's going out of her way to avoid consuming microorganisms as well, such a stance seems kind of silly to me.

You need to grow around 40 times as much plant matter to feed a food animal and turn it into meat than you need to produce the equivalent amount of nutritional value directly from plants. That said, part of the reason that we eat ruminants is that they can digest a lot of plant matter that we can't. Some land is suitable for growing grasses but nothing that humans can eat. The most efficient use of this land for providing food is to use it for feed crops (though much of it could also be used for biofuel

Why do people keep repeating this? People have been living on meat-free diets for centuries and even in the '60s it was shown that a sensible diet will provide the full range of nutrients that humans require.

There are tons of things not in the food, vegan, lacto-vegetarian, ovo-lacto-vegetarian nor in full red meat. Our bodies can synthesize, and do synthesize it.
Of course there are things we can't synthesize. Vitamin C for example. Most mammals can synthesize vitamin C. Only the bats and primates who adopted a fruitarian diet some 30 million years ago lost it. The entire gene factory to synthesize vitamin C exists in our DNA, but a key sequence is lost thus rendering it inoperative DNA.

The fact that I can't assert my dominance and tear your throat out for entering my territory is also not natural. Or that I can't take a shit wherever I want to. Or rape a female. As intelligent beings we have deduced that certain things are "bad" so we don't do those things anymore. Exploiting and murdering animals is one of those things. It has nothing to do with being "natural".

Also a lot of the reason we eat meat is also that it winters well and stores well. Fresh fruit and vegetables in NY in February is being grown on mostly naturally arid land in Arizona and California watered from unsustainable water sources... and then shipped across the country using tons of fuel. Where as meat stores and ships per calorie, per nutrient much cheaper as it is more dense. Granted canning and freezing of some fruits and veges works w

Your right, the worst of the meat is likely worse than the worst of the vegetables for impact. But, trying to say their should be no chicken, fish, or pork just because a very small portion of the beef is grown in CA and it shouldn't be grown in that one place, just is not a good argument. The majority of winter vegetables are grown in these places that are not sustainable, that should be minimized. The worst of the meat should be minimized as well. But Bison has grazed the plains of Wyoming long befor

Well, maybe most practical in terms of supporting your idea that you are 80% vegan, but I think a more representative way would be to look at the food consumed over a larger time, say a month. I could just as easy argue that I am 95% vegan, as I spend less that 72 minutes a day eating, but when I eat my diet is 100% animal based. if you are vegan, you dont consume animal products, if you are not vegan the chances are you are a omnivore. Being 80% vegan is functionally equivalent to not being a vegan. Most f

reminiscent of the Nutripon food taken from a vat grown piece of chicken meat substance called 'Chicken Little' in John Brunner's most excellent (and somewhat visionary) novel called 'The Sheep Look Up':https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheep_Look_Up

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-sheep-look-up-2

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41074.The_Sheep_Look_Up

The Nutripon is meant to be a cheap protein substitute and the bad things that happen in the book are not specifically due to the Nutripon itself althou

Itâ(TM)s only fair to warn you, Mr. Chairman, that much of my evidence will be highly nauseating; it involves aspects of human nature that are very seldom discussed in public, and certainly not before a congressional committee. But I am afraid that they have to be faced,; there are times when the veil of hypocrisy has to be ripped away, and this is one them.You and I, gentlemen, have descended from a long line of carnivores. I see from you expressions that most of you donâ(TM)t recognize the term. Well, thatâ(TM)s not surprising-it comes from a language that has been obsolete for two thousand years. Perhaps I had better avoid euphemisms and be brutally frank, even if I have to use words that are never heard in polite society. I apologize in advance to anyone I may offend.

Until a few centuries ago, the favorite food of almost all men was meat-the flesh of once living animals. Iâ(TM)m not trying to turn your stomachs; this is a simple statement of fact, which you can check in any history bookâ¦

Why, certainly, Mr. Chairman, Iâ(TM)m quite prepared to wait until Senator Irving feels better. We professionals sometimes forget how laymen may react to statements like that. At the same time, I must warn the committee that there is very much worse to come. If any of you gentlemen are at all squeamish, I suggest you follow the senator before itâ(TM)s to lateâ¦Well, if I may continue. Until modern times, all food fell into two categories. Most of it was produced from plants-cereals, fruits, plankton, algae and other forms of vegetation. Itâ(TM)s hard for us to realize that the vast majority of our ancestors were farmers, winning food from the land or sea by primitive and often back breaking techniques; but that is the truth.The second type of food, if I may return to this unpleasant subject, was meat, produced from a relatively small number of animals. You may be familiar with some of them-cows, pigs, sheep, whales. Most people-I am sorry to stress this, but the fact is beyond dispute-preferred meat to any other food, though only the wealthiest were able to indulge this appetite. To most of mankind, meat was a rare and occasional delicacy in a diet that was more than ninety-percent vegetable.

If we look at the matter calmly and dispassionately-as I hope Senator Irving is now in a position to do-we can see that meat was bound to be rare and expensive, for its production is an extremely inefficient process. To make a kilo of meat, the animal concerned had to eat at least ten kiloâ(TM)s of vegetable food â"very often food that could have been consumed directly by human beings. Quite apart from any consideration of aesthetics, this state of affairs could not be tolerated after the population explosion of the twentieth century. Every man who ate meat was condemning ten or more of his fellow humans to starvationâ¦

Luckily for all of us, the biochemists solved the problem; as you may know, the answer was one of the countless byproducts of space research. All food-Animal or vegetable-is built up from a very few common elements. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, traces of sulphur and phosphorus-the half-dozen elements, and a few others, combine in an almost infinite variety of ways to make up every food that man has ever eaten or will ever eat. Faced with the problem of colonizing the moon and planets, the biochemists of the twenty-first century discovered how to synthesize and desired food from the basic raw materials of water, air and rock. It was the greatest, and perhaps the most important, achievement in the history of science. But we should not feel too proud of it. The vegetable kingdom had beaten us by a billion years.

The chemists could now synthesize and conceivable food, whether it had counterparts in nature or not. Needles to say, there were mistakes-even disasters. Industrial empires rose and crashed; the switch from agriculture and animal husbandry to the giant auto